Dress Rehearsal

For some reason day by day I keep looping back to exactly one year ago.  Some of this calendar-nostalgia is related to my poetry 'diary' which I've recently edited.  Of course hindsight is always a little interesting, especially when many of us had little but our own thoughts and sorrows to harken back to.  For anyone  that maintained an actual paper day-book,  thumbing through non-dogeared 2020 pages finds everything as it was written only... nothing fulfilled... as if an illness shipwrecked our lives and confined us each to an unpopulated island from where we wave weakly, unseen.  And despite the restoration of activity, we are not yet on the 'other shore' of safety... we hesitate to put our feet in celebratory waters, to toast one another with bare faces, to laugh publicly unmasked.  

For my ill friends, as I have mentioned many times, there is some consolation in knowing life as we knew it has not gone on without them... that their peers and neighbors have been limited and quarantined similarly... although they are suffering less.  I have grieved often-- for those I've lost, for moments which became more poignant... so much we took for granted.  Such are the lessons of life: we don't know how much we have until it is gone.  Illness is a major highlighter of experience.  I see my 'confined' friends panning through minutes for gold... reducing their wishes and dreams to a new 'smallness'... wistfully sighing over a coffee on a park bench... a walk by the river.  These things have become impossible... the way I used to long to simply see my mother with a cigarette on her telephone, twisting the cord with her beautiful fingers, critically admiring her manicure, her rings-- things she did unconsciously while she gossiped and whispered.

And still... the end of cancel culture for some is a kind of celebration.  A few friends are booking vacations, planning parties, buying concert tickets.  For me it's as though I've been through a kind of sieve, where all the extraneous things have been removed and I'm left with fewer needs, fewer complications.  The pared down version of life for me feels manageable-- simple.  I've come to terms with my needs and ambitions and they are noticeably less than they were one year ago.  There's a parallel between me and my two friends who are winding up the final yarn-ends of their life, who have let go possessions, dreams... and lie in the reality of a bed with a view-- some flowers, a meal... pain the only enemy they must resist, the symptoms of their illness a clingy companion-- a shadow.  Some days the sheets are clean and the nurses are kind.  Maybe I am too empathic-- the spongy, guilty/sad version of me who knows in a nano-second I could be the one in the bed; I have been there and often wonder why I was allowed the gift of time, and why, as Paul Simon said, I often spend it 'writing songs I can't believe' and failing to perform them.  

My intimate girlfriends are sad... they rely on my darkness, in a way. We don't judge one another, but accept our chronic sorrows like an illness. Some nights I lie awake and imagine losing the ability to speak, to write... I understand and absorb the slow rich hours of the sick when I visit my friend in hospice-- sometimes watching the clock hands circling, listening for hallway sounds... thinking about the elasticity of time-- how terror frames seconds and she often waits in the bright sunlight of pain for a simple cloud of relief to pass.  How she tolerates the intolerable and boredom is the coveted edge of a quiet sea at dusk. 

How they miss their mothers, these women who in a hospital bed are suddenly helpless children with no one to comfort and sense their fear.  For so long I have been my own mother... and I became, in a way, the mother/daughter for my own Mom when she was dying. There were times in her life when she spoke to me as a sister-- she confessed.  How she loved my father's smell... that's when she knew he was 'the one', though I find it hard to imagine she loved his 'old man' scent at the end.  Sitting in the hospital chair I wrote a note to my friend with a ballpoint pen and a pad I'd left her.  It somehow reminded me of the morning after parent-teacher night.  I'd picture my mother with her long legs sitting at my little desk, my handsome father with his hand on the chair... looking through my papers and projects.  We'd all do an annual self-portrait.  I asked my Mom to cut my hair because it seemed so much easier to draw yourself with bangs, and I wanted them to admire my work.  The morning after, my teachers always commented how handsome my Dad was... and I'd search my desk carefully for a note.. but there was none.  Every year I'd leave my little notebook open with a pencil... but they never took the hint.

When my son was a schoolboy I always left him a note; doubtful he read this or cared... such is life.  We try to anticipate pains and needs... but we misunderstand, we fail.  I do little to comfort my ill friends.  My worrying and telephoning are badly timed and useless. We do these things for ourselves, I think... we fluff pillows and fix blankets.  There was a Martin guitar in the chapel of the hospice... I suddenly craved playing something but shivered to think about the women and men who wander hospital hallways like a human jukebox trying to cheer the sick and dying who often roll their eyes and groan quietly.

I thought about the thousands of patients who had lain in this bed in the room of my friend... pandemic or cancer-- what difference did it make... I am still in the wake of grief-- of loss... in the shadow of 2020 in an unfamiliar forest of future where illness seems to be a kind of normal.  It does little good to watch someone drown and douse yourself with water in sympathy.  Some of my friends are nurses who have devoted months and months to saving people... and I don't know why I can't seem to find the thrust to move outward from this dark orbit.  

Years ago I read Susan Sontag's 'Illness as Metaphor'.  It is humiliating and dehumanizing to be a patient.  I fear this-- we all fear this, even those of us who are hypochondriacs and seem to wish for incapacity. But most of all it is a kind of rehearsal for death--  a foreshadowing, a preface.  I am not ready... who of us is? Besides, I've always hated rehearsing.  Still, like a kind of tinnitus the daily death logs and statistics ring in my head and haunt me.  It is death I am trying to come to terms with... and it is not yet possible.   I suppose life is the antidote; sympathy does not require suffering or guilt or sacrifice. We had Jesus to teach us these things, and you'd think I'd have learned some 2021 Easter lesson.  

Tonight the rising full moon was directly opposite a spectacular sunset behind the west-side skyline... like life and death... for once the sun and she had come to terms with the stage of sky... and it was only against the backdrop of utter darkness that the clarity really spoke.  Shine on, my Mom used to sing... all of those wonderful moon songs in her funny high voice that I can play back any time on the phonograph of my old heart. And it does, and it will-- in sickness and health, long after death do us part.  

Rain of Kings

There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend Tyrone often announces.  Categories change from day to day, from monologue to monologue.  He's a curb philosopher-- a wise-man without an address, and I'd just as soon get my instructions and remedies from Tyrone. Today-- it's all about the weather: Tyrone and I-- well, we don't dread the rain.

In younger days I often walked along the East River promenade with a baby stroller, my little boy gleefully pointing at boats on one side, me crossing myself as we passed the daunting Cornell hospital buildings on the other-- imagining patients trapped inside... how beautiful sunny weather made them feel ill and ashamed of their confinements, but the rain made them feel safe... convalescent. Today I have friends embedded in hospital rooms-- sentenced to a random but cruel diagnosis.  Who of us expects to be invalidated, incapacitated?  We dread these things, but like rain on our wedding day... well, they don't quite seem real until we are helpless and alone in a dimly-lit room with terrifying machines and digital screens which blink our fate. 

Graveside funerals are so much more poignant with umbrellas... even when I was small, I felt God was grieving from the sky. When I moved to England and married my son's father, the chronic damp sunless weather -- day after day-- embraced my young bones like a dark premonition.  I dispensed with umbrellas and took it, straight up and grey, with the clouds of our failure hovering inside and out.  There will be a royal funeral procession this week-- perhaps the weather will comply.  London rain is epic-worthy.  

Endless essays and articles about loss swimming in my current digital libraries... memorials, obituaries, confessions and prayers...  And then there are the annoying optimists-- the positive, cheerful, grateful Pollyanna's of Facebook and Instagram-- the meme-writers and quoters of happy-faced human emojis.   For the chronically and terminally sick there is little here to celebrate with pain and discomfort the only really constant companions.

I am the useless sympathetic friend.  I want to do something and I really cannot.  Grief and illness counselors have their programs, their suggestions and prescriptions-- none of it comforts the way seeing rain outside one's hospital window might, knowing perhaps you are missing sightly less.  I've been there; the fortunate among us have been there-- paid a bit of toll, put some body parts on layaway to keep the wolves at bay.  

My Irish nanny told me once that the world needed a break-- that rain meant the sky had a sort of cold-- it needed to rest the sun, to cry-- just like children.  I can't remember where in the Bible God created rain... but He certainly used it to punish mankind.  And likewise, it rewarded.  It nourished the land-- sometimes brought biblical miracles--manna... and in places like Louisiana, fish have actually fallen from the sky; frogs in the midwest.  

No miracles are expected with today's rain, although it is my most welcome soundtrack and visitor.  Somehow it connects me to my 'people'; I know they are wet or pensively looking out at the traffic and umbrella congestion-- maybe just a bit melancholy.  Things have happened in rain that would not have happened-- you have run through streets with some person... and because you are wet, you undress at his place and end up drinking from a strange cup by his window in the soft laundry-scented cotton of his clothes.  It becomes a sort of home for you.

I can't recall my mother ever looking 'wet'.  Her hair was always  'done' and she was umbrella'd from door to car and back.  My father-- yes, he was wet.  He played tennis and walked dogs in storms.  My Mom kept her head above water when she swam.  We all had rubbers and galoshes.  I don't remember hers.  I picture her grave in the rain... her coffin and the six feet of earth will have kept her dry... but despite the multitudes of deceased surrounding her, the soft mound where she lies seems desolate on these days. 

For my ill friends-- I am aware my cloying sympathetic melancholy helps not at all.  Nor do shaking my fists at the sky, begging doctors and nurses, telephoning and weeping, rosaries, novenas...  We are not remedies for one another.  Neither of my friends seems to have had a great satisfying love-- a man to lie across their bed and suffocate them with sorrow.  The parting, with romantic drama, is a little more 'post-worthy'... the mourners step into the spotlight... the widowers and wounded lovers.  But in the end we are left with a statistic... an empty bed, the imprint of weeping... a memory of pain, of regret, and then the rain.